His work was epitomised by a blindfolded chimpanzee throwing darts at the stock pages of the Wall Street Journal. An ape, Burton Malkiel suggested, could pick winning stocks as successfully as any investment professional. "In fact, the right analogy is that you throw a towel," he tells the investors chronicle. "And buy an index fund, which is simply a fund that buys and holds the entire market."
It's now 30 years since the Princeton professor first published his seminal A Random Walk Down Wall Street, and Mr Malkiel is adamant that his investment advice has stood the test of time.
In an empowering book for individual investors, Mr Malkiel argued that markets are essentially efficient: any information about a company is already reflected in the share price. There's no such thing as a 'cheap' stock - you get what you pay for. Sometimes it will go up, sometimes it will go down, but there's no way to tell in advance which way it will go. So any person (or primate) picking stocks can do as well as any professional.